


The Knight of Wands

by yikesola



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2011, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:00:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29937240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yikesola/pseuds/yikesola
Summary: “Robot Death Machine” was filmed while Phil was at uni and the part of Dan’s brain that likes to look for patterns because the universe can be a little beautifully random like that thinks it’s neat that he’s watching it in his own shitty uni bedroom. He’s busy thinking that Phil should wear that coat more often because he looks sexy as fuck in black when Phil pulls out a deck of tarot cards.A fic about fate and compromise.
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 12
Kudos: 74





	The Knight of Wands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [calvinahobbes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/calvinahobbes/gifts).



> Happy birthday cal🌾✨

Dan has made his best attempt to revise for tomorrow morning’s exam. Or at least, as good an attempt as he usually makes. His tried and true method of procrastinating until the last minute and then cramming as much information about contract law as his brain can physically handle is about to be tested again, in about four hours at 8am.

He’s hit the point of tiredness that he isn’t even tired anymore. He’s just bored of looking at his textbooks and trying to interpret what is ostensibly English. Bored of being in his concrete prison cell or a room. Bored of hearing only the ringing in his ears because his laptop died twenty minutes ago and he was too lazy to grab the charger. 

Part of him wonders if he should just stay awake until the exam. He’s going to be miserable anyways, why not self-fulfil a little of that prophecy? 

Instead he pushes his textbook off the foot of his bed, bemoaning how stupidly expensive it had been when it hands with a heavy thud. He reaches for his laptop’s charger, pulls his shirt off, and clicks the lamp’s switch. Then he’s laying back on his too-small bed in exactly the same bent-neck position and nothing has changed really except that his warm laptop on his bare chest in the dark room all adds up to _will soon sleep_. 

The laptop comes back to life and starts playing the YouTube video which had been its swan song. 

It’s an old Phil video.

Because of course it is. 

“Staplers are DANGEROUS” is only halfway through but it’s also less than two minutes long. Dan lets it keep playing. It’s an old habit, old indulgence. He doesn’t have a problem, he fully admits to his stalkerish tendencies and Phil makes all the same jokes. Dan was being disgustingly responsible— revising, actually sleeping on campus so he would stand a better chance of making it to his exam on time. He deserved to have Phil’s recorded voice carrying on in the background if he couldn’t have the real thing. 

Autoplay picks “KILLER ESCALATOR” next and then has the audacity to try to make Dan watch one of _his own_ fucking videos. He’s suffered enough torture, he figures, head crammed full of legal jargon. So he immediately clicks on the first Phil video in the recommended list. 

It’s another one that is quite old. Months before Dan would even start chatting up his boyfriend of over a year now. 

“Robot Death Machine” was filmed while Phil was at uni and the part of Dan’s brain that likes to look for patterns because the universe can be a little beautifully random like that thinks it’s neat that he’s watching it in his own shitty uni bedroom. He’s busy thinking that Phil should wear that coat more often because he looks sexy as fuck in black when Phil pulls out a deck of tarot cards.

“My grandma was a psychic woman,” Phil says, “and apparently she’s passed the gift on to me.” 

Dan rolls his eyes. He’s heard that shit from Phil plenty of times. He’s sure Phil’s grandma was a lovely woman, he’s rather fond of his own of course. But he’s also sure that there’s no such thing as goddamn psychics. 

He thinks he remembers what this attempt at fortune telling in the video is going to be. But it’s been a while since he watched this, and Phil does make a fuckton of videos. So when Phil pulls out the _Knight of Wands_ card and reads its supposed interpretation with, “So some guy is gonna have a big impact. An energetic warrior. He has a hasty personality and is very quick to love or hate,” Dan feels goosebumps rise up on his arms. 

He rewinds the video and listens to that part again. 

And a third time. 

He pauses and checks the date Phil had uploaded it. February of 2009. That tarot card was supposedly predicting the following month. Dan fishes for his phone among his pillow and clicks over to his Twitter profile. 

Just as he thought, he hadn’t even made a Twitter account until May. Which… proved that the idea of psychics is shit, right? 

It’s still an annoying coincidence. The kind that he can’t shake as easily as the universe with its infinite possibilities churning out something interesting. Sure a hundred monkeys at a hundred typewriters could eventually write _Hamlet_ , but would those monkeys predict Dan shoving his way into Phil’s life so succinctly? He doesn’t know enough about maths and probability to be sure. 

The screen of his laptop goes dark and now the only light in his tiny room is the bright beam of his phone screen in his face. He calls Phil and rolls over on his side. 

“Wot?” a sleepy Phil answers. 

“Did you predict me?” Dan asks. 

“I didn’t predict you fucking waking me up or I would’ve turned my phone off,” Phil grumbles. Dan can hear him turning over and knocking things over on the upside-down hamper he uses for a bedside table, an ingenious life hack Dan had suggested when Phil admitted he wakes up every day afraid he’s going to step on his glasses. A proper bedside table wouldn’t fit. This flat was not chosen for its square footage. 

“Har har,” Dan deadpans. “With your tarot cards,” he goes on, “did you predict me? With my _hasty personality_ and my _energetic warriorness_?” 

“You didn’t have much energy yesterday when you make me do all the fucking work.” 

“All the… _fucking_ work.” 

“I hate you,” Phil says through equal parts yawn and laugh. “What’s this about, you want me to get my tarot cards?” 

“No, idiot.”

“Oh good,” the mattress creaks as Phil lays back down. “I think they’re at my parents’ house anyways.”

“You made a video like two years ago. Remember?” 

“I’d have to check,” Phil says through another yawn. “I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast.” 

“I do. It rhymes with schmy schmereal.” 

“I can’t think of rhymes half asleep.”

“Right, and I picked such hard rhymes didn’t I, Mr. English Language and Linguistics degree.” 

“I miss you,” Phil says, and Dan knows that means he’s so sleepy he didn’t even hear Dan’s teasing. Just told Dan he misses him, and meant it, like he did for so many late night phone calls before, when there were miles and miles and miles between them. It always feels stupid to sleep at uni when he wanted so badly and for so long to be in the same place as Phil. That’s why he does it so rarely. 

“I miss you too, bub.” 

“Mmmm,” Phil hums. Dan hangs up a few seconds later, sure Phil is fully asleep by then.

He brings his laptop back to life so he can watch that chunk of the video one more time before closing it and setting it down on the floor beside his bed. There’s a warmth in his chest that he can’t blame this time on the laptop. 

He isn’t sure what to call it. He’s never believed in serendipity and magic and ghosts and fate and all that crap. And he still doesn’t, really. This is just a funny strange little thing that happened, like a medium pointing at a section of the audience and saying, “I’m hearing from a name that starts with J” and someone raising their hand because statistically someone in that section having a dead loved one and statistically that dead loved one having a common as hell name like John or Joe or Jessica or Jennifer is really high. Phil could’ve read a card that said, “You’ll meet an obsessive little wannabe emo and actually fall in love with him” or “you’ll make a depressed, annoying, nerdy loser feel like he’s worth something.”

But he didn’t. 

And yet what card Phil _had_ pulled still sounded a hell of a lot like Dan, if not a little complimentary. 

It feels nice. A little confirmation of how this thing between him and Phil always felt… inevitable. Not entirely of course, because it’s a lot of work to get to know someone and a lot of work to survive a long-distance relationship and a lot of work to balance each other’s idiosyncrasies. But still like, they seemed to show up in each other’s lives exactly when they needed to. 

It’s some cosmic coincidental compromise, he figures. Like that one time he tried to sit down with his good Christian Nana and tell her, “Look, believing in evolution isn’t inherently anti-God. Who’s to say that God didn’t just make evolution happen?” 

He still doesn’t believe that a fortune cookie is going to tell him whether he’ll pass a class or not. 

But he does pull out his phone and tweet right before double-checking his alarm and falling asleep, “ _I never really believed in fate until tonight_ ”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading— come say hi on [tumblr](http://yikesola.tumblr.com/post/645162623452823552/the-knight-of-wands) !


End file.
